Census 2027 to commence in Karnataka, seven other states and UTs with self enumeration from April 1

New Delhi: Census 2027 will commence in Karnataka with self enumeration from April 1, followed by a month-long house-to-house ‘Houselisting and Housing Census’ starting on April 15.

The ‘Houselisting and Housing Census’ is the first phase of Census and will be conducted across India between April 1 and September 30 this year during which details related to housing conditions, assets and amenities of households.

This will be followed by the second phase in February next year when population is counted and details of caste, demographic, socio-economic, cultural and other details of every person in each household is collected.

Along with Karnataka, seven other states and union territories – Andaman and Nicobar, Goa, Sikkim, Odisha, Lakshadweep, Mizoram and Delhi (NDMC and Delhi Cant) – will also start the process.

In Karnataka, the self enumeration period – a first during Census operations – will be between April 1 and 15 while the house-to-house exercise will start on April 16 and ends on May 15. The window for self enumeration will be 15 days before the one-month-long field visit.

During the self enumeration process, a person can fill in the details of her household on a dedicated portal and once it is submitted, a self enumeration number is generated. This ID is to be handed over to the enumerator during the field visit and after confirming the self-enumeration data, the enumerator will include it in the original database.

The schedule for poll-bound states barring West Bengal, which has not notified the Census so far, has also been published. Puducherry will have self enumeration from May 17 and house-to-house exercise from June 1 while Kerala has it on June 16 and July 1 respectively. In Tamil Nadu, it will be July 17 and August 1 while in Assam, it is August 2 and August 17 respectively.

Manipur will be the last state to finish the exercise where the self enumeration starts on August 17 and the field visit between September 1 and September 30.

Addressing a press conference, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India Mritunjay Kumar Narayan said 33 questions have been notified for the first phase of Census while the queries, including those on caste, for second phase will be notified later.

He parried questions on the exact contours of how caste will be counted, saying such details will be made public later.

Advising citizens to give accurate information to Census enumerators, he said individual data will remain confidential and cannot be used as evidence or to get benefit under any scheme. Apprehension that data will be misused is misplaced, he said.

"All the individual data collected during the exercise remains confidential. It cannot be shared under the Right to Information Act, used as evidence in a court and cannot be shared with any organisation, be it government or private," he said adding only statistical aggregate data will be used for tabulation purposes.

There is end-to-end data security -- on mobile, during data transmission and at server level, he said.

With the Census going digital, he said data was collected physically earlier, which took a lot of time in digitisation, and from now, they will start to get digital data right from the start and many data sets will be published in 2027 itself.